Generations ago, college seemed to be mostly:
For example, in 1960, only 7.7% of 25-29 year old people in the US had bachelor’s degrees. Compare to 34.0% in 2014. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d14/tables/dt14_104.20.asp
Justonedad at 13 and 14 we did not give it much thought.
My freshmen year of college a student had their eye lost because they were hit by a bottle rocket shot down the hallway.
The group of young men I hung around with did many stupid things through the years, From risky behavior that involved drinking and drugs to risky behavior that did not involve substances.
Looking back the entire group has been extremely successful in our lives.
I had terrible work habits. Not sure how much I regret that because I could learn when I needed to and managed to skate through every level of school doing what seemed to me to be less than the minimum. School work in general was too easy for me. I should have been skipped grades but my parents were worried about me having friends. Bad decision: I needed the challenge and that was obvious. So I largely wasted school. Thing is that’s definitely one thing that would be different now and I’m not talking about more homework but about the internet. Back then I had to look things up in an encyclopedia or deal with those hideous textbooks that taught math or chemistry through a dense filter of poorly chosen words and examples. Now a bright kid can learn advanced math and programming languages for free. I had to take a big book called Fortran and try to figure it out on my own, which I have to say really wasn’t any fun. Intro computer science books were incomprehensible because the subject began in college then. Stats was especially annoying: it relied on computation before we could compute with any ease! Learning chemistry and physics is much easier when you can see animations and thus how the calculations generate the reality. And frankly, I think even back in the 1960’s the understanding of what are now basics like general relativity and quantum mechanics was not that widespread and it was treated more as something rarefied for the few.
The tools available now blow me away. Even when my kids were little, the amount of extra instruction for talented & gifted kids consisted of, well, the entire state budget for it was about the cost of maintaining 2 highly compromised kids in school with their aides. I used to argue, “Don’t you realize one reason China et al are succeeding is they put resources into the kids who will generate a return for society?” I wasn’t and am not against special education - my wife has an advanced degree in it - but rather that when we skimp on educating the brightest that’s the same as not maintaining or not building the infrastructure needed to generate a better future.
I’m going to go ahead and bite on this. There are seven million residential swimming pools in the United States, mostly in the South and Southwest. That’s a lot of pools. Maids have become a bit less common due to rising wages, but it’s still common. This fact often shows up in popular culture; think of television shows like Hazel, The Brady Bunch (Alice), Maude (Florida), and the list could go on.
I grew up in a town with a wealthy area. (not where I lived). We used to “camp out” in our yards in the summer and about 1 or 2 in the morning go to the wealthy homes and jump in their built in pools. There could be as many as 20 boys.
When I got to college I found out other kids in other areas with wealthy families used to do the same thing.
One kid always told the story of growing up in Montclair and swimming in the backyard pool of the family that owned Swanson Foods. Problem was he and his friends were uninvited guests between midnight and 4am.
I personally think that it is all a double standard that is caused by sensationalist news and 24 hour news reporting that scares parents.
DH was a stoner who barely graduated HS. Yet he totally pressures our kids to stay motivated and organized. DH used to play out in the woods and streets without any supervision and then be called in for dinner, yet he didn’t let our kids walk to the park unsupervised. As a teen, I used to attend parties where the parents bought the alcohol and took the kids car keys. Nowdays, we can’t do this for fear of getting sued.
As for academics, I was a slacker kid in AP classes; I was the dumbest of the smart kids. DH was a slacker kid in the regular classes And we turned ok…probably top 2% of income on a national scale. Yet we keep the double standard of pushing our kids. If our kids slacked off, they probably would do just fine and with a lot less anxiety. Somehow, we just cannot stop. It’s always the faster this, the better that, etc.
DH would probably argue that we are trying to instill a work ethic in them. And if it wasn’t working hard at school, then it should be working hard at a paying job.
I didn’t get all A’s in high school. I graduated in the top 20% from a very competitive HS with a 3.0 GPA. Honestly, it was fine. I was a good kid…always where I said I was going to be. I didn’t drink (I still don’t drink). Occasionally I was late getting home, but really except for that, I was a well behaved kid.
When I got to college, I wanted all As. I studied with several friends and we really pushed each other to do well. We were the top students in our program. At that point, my parents didn’t really care what I was doing. I was paying my way, and I didn’t live at home.
What kind of top-2%-of-income-job can a reformed high school stoner qualify for and succeed at?!
President of the United States of America.
Woo hoo for President Obama!! Actually, most careers and most jobs.
Funny, I thought @Vladenschlutte was referring to President Obama’s predecessor
This caught my eye. I graduated in the top 10% (by the skin of my teeth) with A’s and B’s. At that time my HS offered no AP and honors classes only in english and math. I was in math honors, but there was no grade weighting. It was rare for anyone to have a 4.0. In contrast my kids were in almost all honors and took several AP’s. In D’s class a weighted 4.0 would barely get you into the top 10%.
Lets not forget “but I didn’t inhale”.
In my group of friends were kids who graduated from MIT, Duke, Columbia and other schools like that. There were also several kids that were in the bottom 10 kids of the over 600 student body.
The wealthiest are 2 that finished in the bottom of the class. Both opened their own business. One in construction and the other in real estate. Making money is not restricted to only academic stars.
I should add my younger brother had a friend who was smart but a stoner who did not do well in school. He now has one of the largest landscaping companies in NJ. He is very rich.
When I was in HS, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, there was still a strong focus on academics amongst my peers and their families, but college was much easier to get into. We applied to maybe 3 or 4, and most of my friends went to top schools. I recall sitting in a class senior year and the teacher asked us where we were going to college. The responses: " Harvard, Yale, MIT, WIlliams, Cal Tech, Smith, Vassar, Tufts, Pomona, Stanford, Wesleyan, SUNY Stonybrook, Brown, Pembroke, Swarthmore, Radcliffe, Princeton, Penn."
(yes this is when Radcliffe and Pembroke were still separate schools).
We all participated in ECs because we liked them, not because we were pressured into it or engaged in resume padding.
This was a public HS, and most of the students either went to local cc’s, state schools, trade schools or no college at all. We were a little “pre-college confidential” bubble, perhaps. The students in the honors and AP classes did not make up the majority of the class.
I was referring to both actually.
Yeah- agree with jym. When I (I’m about her age) was in high school it never occurred to anyone to do an EC (we called them “activities” back then) to enhance a college application!
When Governor Perry was running for re-election, I heard a commercial from an opponent that said “Governor Perry’s Texas A& M transcript: Brought to you by the letters C and D.”
When I was in HS, it never dawned on anyone to take the SAT more than one time either.
And I never did any HS sport…ever…and somehow I managed to get accepted to colleges.
It was definitely a different world. Lergnom and I share something in common, I was one of those kids where it came too easy, and as a result never learned the study skills that really make a difference. I didn’t crack a book through 8th grade and had a 4.0 (except handwriting!). The teachers didn’t care, as long as I got A’s on the tests and blew out whatever standardized tests they gave us, it certainly wouldn’t matter to them. As a result, my high school career wasn’t spectacular particularly, despite taking honors level courses, and my college career was more like fighting off getting the heave ho…wasn’t particularly motivated. Funny part was when I got to the work world that changed, what my father saw as laziness turned into something quite different (it was ironic, my mom herself had been out there, she graduated from high school at 14 in NYC in the early 1940’s, faced the issues of being gifted, yet couldn’t see my struggles). One of the things that highlights is despite all the hype, that what you do in life is based in a lot more than how well you did in school, a lot of companies were founded by people who didn’t go to Ivies, didn’t have 4.0’s and 2300 SAT’s and so forth, and even if you are a school superstar who plays the game with the EC’s and grades and test scores, it doesn’t mean you will necessarily achieve down the road.
With my S, my wife and I are not tiger parents and neither of us particularly believes all the hype. We sent S to a private school, even though in many ways we would have preferred him go to a public school, because we realized the schools hadn’t changed much with kids who are out there, the drip who was supposedly the gifted kid coordinator told us basically they loved having kids like that, because the blew out test scores and the school didn’t have to do a lot of work to achieve that…and we got lucky. The school he went to for grade school had true teachers, people who truly loved teaching, and they emphasized study skills, they knew what our S could do, and they made sure he still had to do the work, and he will tell you that helped him a great deal, taught him not to rely on his native ability and to work at it.
In many ways, he is a different person than we were, for one thing he had a passion for music, and it was all internalized with him, we saw plenty of kids who were talented on an instrument that were pushed by parents, but with him it all came from within, and I admire that. I never had that kind of passion growing up (or if I did, it probably was stamped out by my parents), so it amazed me how he has gone for it, how he pretty much decided by the time he was 11 or so to get on the serious track, and his path has been driven by him. He also fascinates me, because a lot of music kids tend to be very inward looking and micro focused, yet while music is an incredible passion for him, and he knows so much about it, he also has a whole world he is interested in, he amazes me when he talks about some current event and the depth to which he understands it, or the fact that I think he could walk into a sports bar anywhere in this country and get people buying him drinks with his knowledge of sports and teams, not bad for a music geek…
It is definitely a different world, and I think in some ways it is because this is such a time of transition, of anxiety, and people are looking for surety, hence the whole push that college is the answer. Back when I graduated from high school, while I went to a school where most of the kids were planning to go to college, they came from white collar backgrounds mostly where it was expected, there were kids heading into vocational programs like plumbing or electrician training, or into having their own businesses, and that was not uncommon, the high school my wife went to was mostly blue collar, and many of the kids there weren’t interested in college. I read something recently, a poll of recent college graduates, and the surprising thing was more than half of them felt that the cost of going to college wasn’t worth it, that I think says a lot. College is being sold as instructional training/vocational training these days, rather than being about learning, and I think a lot of kids are sensing that idea isn’t true, that in a sense they are being sold a bill of goods. One of the things I think our education system needs to figure out is how to develop tracks where college isn’t necessarily the be all and end all, you could have vocational training post secondary that for example would allow someone to do programming, you don’t need a cs degree or an engineering degree to program, or for example, to run computerized CNC equipment in high tech factories or fix them.